It's interesting how polarizing this article is. After zigzagging several times while reading the comments I just think that reality is more nuanced than "never

It's interesting how polarizing this article is. After zigzagging several times while reading the comments I just think that reality is more nuanced than "never apologize" or "apologize", and it simply depends on the context. It seems to me that most comments with a strong opinion (including the article) have a specific scenario in mind, involving assumptions about the dev's intentions to write good code, the bug's effect, how easy it would have been to avoid the bug, and who is this person we're considering to apologize to (coworker / manager / customer / QA who found the bug). In some situations apologizing feels right, in others it doesn't, so there's not much sense in generalizing from a single scenario to the general case. I think ultimately it comes down to matching expectations: almost all people involved in software development expect bugs. The question is how much effort do they expect me to put into reducing the quantity and severeness of those bugs. When I go to a dentist I expect them to make every possible effort to avoid harming me; generally this is not the expectation of software developers going about their day. A feature that takes one hour with reasonable effort at ensuring quality could easily take a day or a week if you make _every possible effort_ to ensure it is bug-free. Different pieces of code (at different times) could have different amounts of impact, so it takes a wider understanding of the code's context to decide how much effort I'm going to put into chasing bugs. When in doubt, I match expectations with the relevant stakeholder(s). Then the situations where apologizing feels right are either those where I didn't meet the expectations, e.g. I was in a hurry to push so I didn't take the time to properly test and I should have known better (not very frequent); or situations where I didn't take the time to properly match expectations (though sometimes that's on the other party, but it takes two to match expectations). One other thing regarding responsibility - I think that taking responsibility and apologizing are different things. Sure, you can take responsibility by apologizing, but there are other ways too. When something breaks in my apartment and I call my landlord, they (usually) take full responsibility and make sure the problem is fixed, but so far they never apologized, and it would feel funny if they did.